Hard drive making repetitive sound, smart status says everything is ok

merk

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Nov 5, 2001
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I have an 8gb seagate drive that's about 2 years old. Today it started making a repetitive sound that has me worried since as far as i can tell there shouldn't be anything running that's accessing the drive extensively. It usually starts to make this sound a few minutes after booting up.

I tried to record the sound, you can listen here: http://youtu.be/z5Vww9b7z5U - you'll probably have to turn up your volume to hear the clicking sound, it's pretty faint on the recording.

crystal disk info says smart status is good. seatools also says the drive is good.

Anyone have any ideas whats going on here? Or any way for me to figure out if some process/program is causing this?
 
Solution
The way I look at it is this.
I have had many drives make noise and subsequently fail.
For me...the cost of a new drive is much less painful than dealing with a failed drive.
merk, you may need a firmware update on the drive. The drive (from listening to the video) is doing a repetitive search thus the sound. If Seatools did not find any issue, that also is a good indication but be sure to run the long test (it can take a very long time). Also want to take this opportunity to remind you to have a good back up in place.

The conventional wisdom by tech experts on backups is known as the 3-2-1 method.

Basically you want:

3 copies of any data you don't want to lose
2 different mediums it's stored on
1 copy kept offsite, to prevent against disaster.
 

merk

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yeah i agree - just thought i would check here just to see if maybe something else was going on. It just seems odd that it does this when i'm NOT actively using the drive. I copied about 1tb of data from it to a new drive and it appears to be doing that without any issues at all. It only starts making this sound after it's been sitting idle for 2-3 minutes. Even if i remove the drive from within windows, and just leave it plugged in, it still starts making that sound.

The ironic thing is i literally just bought a new 8tb drive to replace an older 4tb drive, and now it looks like the 8tb drive i had is about to fail..

Oh, and the drive has the latest firmware - DN03.

I'll try running the long test in seagate tools after i've finished copying everything.

 

merk

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I agree - not trying to argue against replacing it, just wanted to check for any other possible explanations. And I'm more convinced now that it's dying - i started copying some files off of it a few hours ago and it's only %60 done. The speed keeps fluctuating from a few kb to 100mb

 

merk

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Well, seagate tools just finished the long test and it came back as saying nothing was wrong with the drive. Anyone know of any other tools to verify what the drive is actually doing? At this point I would still agree that it's getting ready to fail. But I'd like some proof since it's still under warranty. I'm guessing if i return the drive to seagate and just say it's making repetitive noises, they might say there's nothing wrong with it and not replace it.